I was ready to buy a 13" MBA / 256 / 8 yesterday, so I went to the local shopping street, which has three different stores where Macs are sold. Neither of these stores had anything but 2012 models and base configurations of the new models.
When I had a closer look at the MBAs in the store, I was surprised to see that I had forgotten how big they are. In other words, 11" is big enough, and there was no reason for me to go for 13".
In the end, I decided that I do not need 8 GB RAM anyway for my browsing-writing-facebooking-skyping needs, and so I bought the base 11" model.
I would still have preferred to buy a 256GB model instead of a 128GB model for storing pictures, movies etc, I guess I will have to pay more attention to storage space now. This will not be my primary computer, so I should be fine.
The store then surprised me with a 100 euro voucher for apple accessories, which I immediately used for buying a cable to hook up the MBA with my 24" dell monitor, and then spent the remaining 70 euros on app store credit.
In short: I started out thinking I would be spending close to EUR 1500, and I walked out having spent just EUR 1029 with a MBA and EUR 100 extras... Seriously, these people fail in extracting money from me in accordance with my willingness to pay!
I had an iMac a couple of years ago, but I did not like OSX too much (or rather: iPhoto, Mail etc...) and went back to Ubuntu on the desktop. However, for a portable computer, I am quite confident that this MBA will not disappoint!
First impressions:
- The screen is quite reflective, but not too small for my taste. The relatively low resolution does not bother me either.
- Excellent keyboard - happy that I can disable the backlighting
- Surprised to see how many apps are not in the app store (dropbox, skype, etc...), but that's not really a problem of course.
- full screen + multitouch is great
